


The Greenest of Trees in Winter

by Chromat1cs



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Adorable Lesbians Invent Love, Arranged Marriage, Banter, Canon Compliant, Daydreaming, F/F, Female Eivor (Assassin's Creed), First Meetings, Headcanon, Hopeful Ending, Light Angst, Minor Original Character(s), Non-Explicit Sex, Old Norse, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Canon, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Reindeer Clan Randvi, Wedding Night, and you know we love some alliteration, because I love the fanon about the longship designs so dang much, it's about the yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:00:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27811927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: With a wedding comes peace—peace between clans, peace across the mountains, peace in every fjord...And chaos within Randvi’s very being.When she meets a wolf amid an unkindness of Ravens, she hardly expects the craving to invite such long teeth into the meat of her heart.-“If he hurts you,” she hisses, her breath warm on Randvi’s ear, “I am too far in drink to keep from striking him.”Randvi twists to meet her gaze for an instant, their stares clashing. She wets her lips with a nervous dart of her tongue and finds strength in the hungry way Eivor tracks it. “Stand near and let me look at you, and it will be smoother for me.”She does not linger to see the slight widening of Eivor’s eyes at that, the flare of her nostrils and the clenching of her jaw. Randvi turns and follows her husband to their bridal couch to the wingbeat cadence of her racing heart.
Relationships: Eivor/Randvi (Assassin's Creed), Randvi/Sigurd Styrbjornson
Comments: 36
Kudos: 353





	The Greenest of Trees in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> I just [clenches fist] OOF I would absolutely goddamn die for Randvi. I love one (1) perfectly flawed viking wife.
> 
> This fic is essentially one big headcanon, Reindeer-clan Randvi and dark-haired Eivor and small-fish-in-big-pond Sigurd and all! I tried to keep the wedding customs as historically accurate as possible, but if I have an error anywhere please let me know :>
> 
> This fandom, however green it still is, has been an absolute joy to write for and interact with since the game’s release—here’s to LOTS more E/R work to come! Skál!

_—_

_Ýr er vetrgrønstr viða;_ _  
_ _vænt er, er brennr, at sviða._

_//_

_Yew is the greenest of trees in winter;_ _  
_ _it is wont to crackle when it burns._

— The Norwegian Rune Poem, 13th cen.

—

The lands of the Reindeer clan swell with yarrow flowers in the summer. 

_These will go in my hair on my wedding day,_ Randvi once announced to her fellows after crashing through the forests playing at a child’s raid, _braided into a crown fit for a queen!_

_The queen of slugs,_ Arne capered back between the fistfuls of wild blueberries he was shoving into his gob. Solstice was just past, and the sun burned low at the atmosphere after a long day of carrying on as only children can. 

_And who will be your betrothed?_ Yrsa cooed, prodding at Randvi’s foot with the butt of her dulled sword. _You would look pretty on the arm of a troll husband._

Randvi had turned up her nose and kicked away Yrsa’s blade. _I’ll be queen of a place hammered with gold and a sun that never sets,_ she had insisted, _not a troll in sight! I’ll invite you there someday so you can eat your words._

Randvi blinks. The longboat lurches as the shore grinds beneath its hull, rocky and crusted with frozen ocean slush. A lump sits firmly in Randvi’s throat as she stares out at the shards of Rygjafylke’s coastline—against the slate-grey sky, wintry clouds low as drawn brows, it seems the waiting mouth of a steel trap.

“Randvi?”

She looks to the captain and swallows, her throat dry. A shiver wracks her body despite the layers of rich furs about her shoulders.

_I wanted to be married in the spring,_ Randvi had wept in the private peace of her mother’s quarters before making sure the last of her belongings in Sygnafylke were packed. The only tears Randvi has ever shed in public were for mourning the dead, but she has allowed her noble daughter's mask to slip on rare occasion where none can see. 

The warmth of her mother’s hand cradling her head as though she was still a babe has been seared into Randvi’s skull throughout this frigid jostle of a journey southward. _I know,_ she murmured with the same pitch of her voice that she used to sing lullabies with little Randvi cradled close to her breast, _but we do what we must for the good of our people._

“Have we arrived?” Randvi asks. Blessedly, her voice does not crack. A sharp blade of wind slices through the blowing snow and clears it for a moment—a path of burning torches leads up a steep path sloped into the rock, where the foggy clouds devour its slim spine into nothing.

The captain stands and extends one hand with a nod. The snarling of the other Sygnafylke ships finding shoreline begins chorusing as though heralding a raid, and Randvi thinks for a moment that she could turn this day on its head. Rather than marry the jarl’s son, she could rally the Reindeer folk and charge on their longhouse while the Ravens are gorged with feast, blind with drink, dulled by the warmth of revelry. Instead of bending to his marriage bed, she could force the buzzard to his knees and make him kiss her blade.

Randvi reaches down to worry her fingers at the handle of her axe and finds nothing but richly-woven fabric. Her mother’s sad eyes eddy in her memory, the funeral smoke of her clansmen lives still in her nose. She tightens her jaw.

_For her people._ She will do this because it is right, not because it is fair. It is all she _can_ do.

Randvi stands as the surf buffets the ship's timbers and activity spills onto the frozen beach as casks of mead and trays of gifts are quickly ferried up the winding, torchlit path ahead of her alongside their swift-footed messenger.

There is no yarrow in Rygjafylke, not in the dead of winter. But this union cannot wait until the spring.

_I wanted to be married in the spring._

Randvi takes her captain’s hand, disembarks, and does not wince when foreign pebbles crunch and roll beneath her fine-soled boots. If she must make a home for herself amidst Ravens, she will do what she must and sprout wings to rival Muninn himself.

—

Her shadows are thrown in dancing shapes about the walls of the wellhouse as Randvi bathes, candles clustered with tall flames stacked throughout the room as though pushing back against the deep plunge of day-long dark outside. The scrap of daylight should be here soon—although if the clouds here persist, it will never break through. 

Randvi's teeth chatter as she splashes another bowl of water down her back despite the warmth and perfume of it. Her skin is all prickle-flesh and the wind whistles through the gaps in the stones of the wellhouse. Without the soft murmur of her mother making cursory conversation with a Raven woman beyond the shut door, it would feel as though Randvi were bathing somewhere at the top spire of the world with nothing below her but sky. 

She never expected the cleansing of her maidenhood to be so lonely. Randvi shuts her eyes, holds her breath, and pours a flume of water over her head. _Stop it,_ she thinks as the curtain of her hair plasters to her shoulders and along the knots of her shivering back, _stop longing for what will never come to pass. This is the fate spun together for you, and you cannot reweave it._

The drying furs stacked beside the bathing basin are blessedly plush when Randvi steps from the water and wraps them close against her skin. Her mother gives her a wobbly smile when she opens the door, and together they hurry into her bridal chambers before the cold can bite too sharply into Randvi's freshly-washed flesh. 

They set to braiding Randvi's hair into a ceremonial pile of plaits and beads and twists of silver. Several of the women from Rygjafylke prattle about the jarl's son, Sigurd, making his sojourn into the crypt for his family's sword. _Sigurd._ A victorious name, a name for a hero—Randvi has never supposed she would marry a hero. As she feels herself drift far away from her body with the prod and gentle pull of the women parting and weaving her hair, images of her old daydreams float flotsam through Randvi's mind. 

_I will be a just wife,_ she mused once to Yrsa when they had both tripped barely past womanhood, exploring the confounding twists of desire with youth's folly driving them together. _I will be honest, and my husband will accept this._

Yrsa's laugh was more of a snort when Randvi waved a hand between them—her face was still flushed pink with exertion and the harried discovery of bliss by Yrsa's quick hands between her legs. _And how will you ensure that?_

Randvi had shrugged. _I will choose a man who is smart enough to love me, but not so proud that he will attempt to bind me._

_What is marriage, if not bondange?_ Yrsa raised one thick, dark eyebrow and pinned Randvi with that sapphire stare of hers—Randvi feels her heart wrench gently with the memory when it dovetails in a flash with Yrsa's face not four moons ago, frozen in a warrior's death in the mountain crag. _Besides,_ she had teased in a murmur, running an idle finger along Randvi's chin, _how can you be sure you will get to choose?_

"You're fit for Alfheim!"

Randvi starts as her dream is ripped away in an instant—Yrsa's voice fades into the low hiss of the candles framing the long dressing mirror. Owlish, Randvi blinks at the bride staring back at her until she realizes it really is her own reflection. 

"You look so beautiful," one of the Raven women says earnestly. She smiles at Randvi over her shoulder, and Randvi cannot help but think of how she may very well have collided with this woman in the fog of battle not two winters past. She offers a smile in the mirror that does not reach her eyes. 

"Now," Randvi's mother announces with the sort of voice that precludes a long saga verse. She gestures for Randvi to come and sit beside her on a long bench draped with white fox furs. 

"Now what?" Glancing about the room as though some great bridal secret will burst from the walls, Randvi carefully takes a seat on the furs. 

"It is time," her mother says, her hands folded in her lap and her crested necklace winking in the candlelight, "to discuss your duties as a wife."

Randvi manages to hold in a snort. "I have a fine hand to sweep a hearth and can keep a _very_ tidy house," she insists. The pit of her stomach roils softly with what she suspects is coming, despite her feigning. Her mother's mouth draws into a thin line. 

"And you must bear children, Randving." 

The compulsion to roll her eyes and insist that these wisened married women are several winters too late to be taking Randvi through her first turn about the rota of sex is hard to ignore. Had she more fire left in her guts, she might have cocked her head and asked whether or not she should expect her new husband to try and slip a finger into her backside during their consummation—but she is tired from the journey here and simply looks forward to the day being over, so Randvi widens her eyes with what she hopes is a believable mockery of abashed surprise and lets the women teach her everything she already knows. 

In truth, the thought of bearing children makes Randvi ill. She has only seen, handled, and sucked on a man's parts before; the only thing she's ever truly had inside her is Yrsa's gentle, exploratory touch. Imagining something so dull as a turgid length of flesh rutting in and out of her slit does nothing for the swim of Randvi's desire. She nods and gasps and giggles along with the lesson, as fine an act as any skald would be proud to see, all the while imaging the sweet and beckoning acuity of a woman's fingers playing at her sex. 

It is a blessedly brief instruction, focused solely on mechanics, the way to beget the seed, and everything that precludes it—she may bleed, it may sting, her husband could be drunk from feasting so she might need to coax him back to stiffness more than once. The Raven women depart with cheeky smiles to set the feasting hall, and Randvi feels herself drop an unseen weight from her shoulders when she and her mother are alone. 

"Randving," her mother says softly, reaching out to stroke Randvi's cheek. She gives a sad smile. "It is not the match I would have chosen for your heart, but it is the match we need."

Swallowing the tears she does not need to shed here, her weeping done on the floor of a home she knows rather than that of a foreign cottage, Randvi smiles her own pained smile. "I know, mor."

Her mother's mouth tightens briefly, her own tears threatening and yet staying back with a Reindeer's iron will. "You will be a good wife."

She draws a flashing twist of silver from her sleeve, and Randvi cannot hold in a gasp. The bridal crown she has snuck peeks at throughout her childhood where it stayed among her mother's precious things is waiting on outstretched palms now for her to take as her own. "Oh!" is all she can think to cry softly as she reaches down and takes it up with careful fingers—it seems it may dissolve like a dream-shard if Randvi handles it too quickly. 

"You will keep your kransen here with you." her mother bids her, nodding at Randvi's simple circlet nestled atop the carefully-folded finery in which she had arrived. "If you have a daughter, she will wear it proudly—and hopefully not lose it in the forest."

A burble of desperate laughter jumps from Randvi's throat like the white belly of a leaping fish. She stares at herself in the mirror and touches gently at the crown her foremothers have worn for generations—its chips of shimmering stone and carefully-wound strands of metal sit comfortably on Randvi's head, and an unexpected wash of relief fills her. "If I have a daughter," she murmurs, still staring at her reflection, "she will be Hilda after you."

"Fate willing," her mother murmurs, placing that warm, familiar hand to Randvi's shoulder one last time, "you will have many peaceful children to take the names of people who are alive to watch them grow tall."

Randvi takes her mother's hand and squeezes it softly. She has plenty of time to agonize quietly over the plague of children—first, she must conquer bridehood.

—

The Raven women lead Randvi and her mother up the winding path to the Rygjafylke longhouse. Thankfully these southron mothers and daughters seem as though they could pick out their village pathways in moonless dark, as Randvi cannot see twelve paces in front of her for the smear of the fog and snow around them. She finds that she is jittering with nerves and cold alike—Randvi is well used to the unforgiving bite of winter, but she is as good as stark-naked in the face of impending marriage. 

It feels as though she is at the bottom of a well, and the rope thrown down to rescue her has set itself afire and will burn away before she has a chance to climb all the way out. 

The women stop outside the longhouse. The doors open wide to the golden glow of ceremony, and Randvi feels the last of that fabled rope singe to ash between her fists. This is her fate. She must do what is right. 

"Now comes my bride."

Dazzled briefly by the glare of brightness after so long in low candlelight and the heavy sky outside, Randvi squints until her eyes adjust to the longhouse. A slim man in a fine-threaded tunic and decorative armor oil-polished to a sheen bows his head to her. A flattering tattoo of layered arrows stands out, freshly needled into his skin, between his brows, and Randvi finds herself touched with a jot of comfort to find that this Sigurd of Rygjafylke also has a head of bright, copper-red hair. 

"And my groom," Randvi replies with her own smile and a neat curtsy. Sigurd holds out a hand to her, which she takes with a light touch. 

"We present your bride," the húskarl from Sygnafylke announces with his bear's snarl of a voice, "Frú Randvi Róarsdóttir of the Reindeer Clan—first child of Jarl Róar Troelsson; unscarred battlemaiden of the Westlands; flame-touched far-daughter of Åse the Unburnt!"

Randvi's face goes hot, and not simply for the warmth of the candlefire. Her litany of titles is not one she hears often and a terrible unfitting thing when she does. _I am simply Randvi,_ she has shouted before to her father, _Randvi your daughter, Randvi who prefers ale and swordplay over pretending at fucking diplomacy! Do not try to make me more than that!_

Sigurd clears his throat with good humor. His groomsmen, four equally battle-hewn and well-armored drengr beside him, chuckle between themselves. "I," Sigurd says with a smile at Randvi as he brings her hand to his lips, "am simply Sigurd Styrbjornson of the Raven Clan." He kisses her knuckles, a sweet kiss if not a touch dry, and Randvi can't help but return his grin. "No more than that for now, but I hope in the future that I can rise past a simple jarl's son and one day give you the world."

Randvi holds his stare with her own for a long moment. He looks the part—the polished and smooth-handled axe strapped to his right side and the ceremonial crypt sword to his left, the small braid at the peak of a fighter's beard, a powerful glint to the clear sharpness in his eyes. 

Perhaps it will be easier than Randvi had thought, to do the right thing for her people. 

The ceremony continues without fault, if not a quick and fairly quiet thing. They exchange their ceremonial swords: the húskarl hands Randvi her father's blade to bow and pass to Sigurd, while the Raven Clan longsword becomes heavy in her hands—another revered piece of metal that Randvi is to save, this one if she herself becomes heavy with a son someday. The Raven húskarl then presents the rings of hammered silver, which Randvi balances carefully on the hilt of the longsword and Sigurd sets on Róar's. Sigurd nearly fumbles it to the ground, and Randvi lets herself break with a chuckle when he catches it before it hits the earth. 

"See here," Sigurd murmurs, holding out the hand in which he has caught the ring, "you are so lovely you make me shake."

His fingers are trembling, ever so slightly. The smallest well of affection begins widening in Randvi's gut as Sigurd gives her another little smile. 

The ring fits a bit loose at the knuckle. There is surely no shortage of a blacksmith's talent here in a clan of such formidable fighters, but Randvi is content to wait until after the wedding celebrations are over and done to fix her jewelry. 

"By the eyes of the gods," the Raven húskarl announces, his arms outstretched to the small crowd of them, "by the law of these clans, the peace of these families, I see you bound in marriage as man and wife!"

The groomsmen shout first, their battle-cry suited now for the death of conflict itself rather than a fallen foe. Sigurd raises his eyebrows with an expectant grin as he takes a step toward Randvi, and as she acquiesces there is a sense of pride that moves in Randvi's veins for having dragged her clan onto the shores of peace regardless of the slurry of feelings it causes inside her. She shuts her eyes and kisses Sigurd as his wife—the longhouse erupts into cheers, a horn blows from somewhere on the roof, and far away in Randvi's most cherished memories she feels Yrsa smiling sadly at her from the sweeping infinity of Fólkvangr. 

—

The wind is blowing with a foul force when the wedding party moves to the feast hall, and Randvi is grateful to follow the groom party to the flickering smudge of yellow across the village. Were it not for the madness of torches lit and the music already in full swing, there would be no telling where the feast was to take place in the absolute white of snowfall. 

It is disappointing not to have the bridal race. Some of the Raven women who have been attending Randvi since her arrival look fast and fiercely strong, and Randvi would have liked to see some of Sigurd's wide-handed groomsmen trying to gracefully pour mead and wine all night. 

They reach the hall, the warmth from within rolling from its eaves like the lather of a well-run horse. Sigurd stands at the door with his arms outstretched and his breath clouding before him in mighty plumes of steam. "Who will give to me my wife," he calls out, "so I can see her safely over the threshold!"

"I will," Randvi's mother calls, raising one hand as Randvi steps forward. The wind blows her hair across her face when Randvi looks over her shoulder to give her mother a parting smile—something to thank her, or perhaps a small part of her still begging to go home to Sygnafylke. 

"Come!" Sigurd bids her with a wide and eager grin, and it is now that Randvi sees him already touched with celebratory drink from some time ahead of her arrival. 

_Would that I'd had a draught of something strong on the ship,_ she thinks to herself. Randvi takes Sigurd's hand before she cries out in surprise—he sweeps her into his arms to another raucous cheer from his groomsmen and kicks open the feast hall door, and Randvi is stunned by a roaring cheer inside the hall from the waiting revelers. 

"To our newest Raven," Sigurd shouts, "Randvi, my bride!"

_"Skál!"_ The Ravens shout as one. A bolt of frisson shoots up Randvi's spine. 

"Sigurd!" The burliest of the groomsmen calls out, "stick the ceiling so we might know how _rich_ your future is to be!" He ruts his hips forward, miming a smooth fuck, to fevered encouragement from the hall. Sigurd sets Randvi back on her feet and quickly climbs to stand on the nearest table, where he draws Róar's longsword. It feels strange to see it held aloft in another's hand. 

"To the Ravens!" Sigurd shouts. 

_"Já!"_ The hall echoes, mead horns in the air. Sigurd's expression is suffuse with triumph.

"To the jarl!"

_"Ja!"_

"To every son and daughter my wife will bear!"

_"Ja!"_ The Ravens begin beating the tabletops and stomping their feet, drumming up the pitch of anticipation, and Randvi's heart is in her throat as Sigurd draws back and thrusts the sword up into the thatching of the roof. 

The cheer dies off quickly. Only the first half-hand length of the blade has sunk in, stopped by some timber or another. Even the lyre player goes quiet. 

One of the other groomsmen gives a tittering laugh. "Well, so much for _bearing."_

Randvi knows it's a joke, but she still feels shame go hot and red behind her cheeks. Sigurd glares at the young man. "Care to put some weight behind your words, Njal?"

The feast hall thrums with hushed excitement at the potential for shows of strength before they've even properly dug into the meal. Two of the groomsmen shove at skinny Njal's shoulders, and he looks fairly petrified to have stepped too far over the line before anyone has had enough to drink. 

The doors at the far end of the feast hall slam open before anybody can carry Sigurd's challenge further. 

_"Eivor!"_ one of the Ravens cries from the cluster of musicians, and another welcoming cry throughout the smoke-rimed warmth pushes the brawl out of mind in an instant. 

Sigurd leaps back down to the ground in one smooth movement, and before Randvi can tell where he's going he has her by the hand. "Come," he says quickly—his palm is hot with adrenal flow already. "My best drengr is returned by the hair of Tyr's balls, the boar! We must introduce you!"

The feast hall seems to swirl as Randvi follows Sigurd at a clip, a dizzying atmosphere as though Randvi has choked down too much quickthorn tea far too quickly. Strangers, her new kinsmen, clap her and Sigurd about their shoulders as they pass, hailing them with drinking horns and shouts of good luck alike. Whatever Randvi has ever dreamed about her wedding feast, it was a far cry from this. 

"Eivor!" Sigurd crows as he spins a tall, cloaked figure around from the mead barrel with a hard hand to the arm. Randvi prepares to force a smile at a broken-nosed warrior with more fingers than teeth left in his face—but she finds the breath kicked from her lungs by the most stunning pair of ice-blue eyes she's ever seen in her life. 

Truly, it's the eyes that snare Randvi first. The scar that rips through the drengr's left cheek and the decorated spill of her dark braids as she pulls away her hood only fade into Randvi's consciousness moments after Randvi remembers to start breathing again. She seems carved from power itself: her leathers are worn but well looked-after, the broad lines of her mouth drawn with exertion yet hemmed by the glow of glory, her carriage a long pour of trained bulk and sinew and still clearly quick as anything on the field with the way her armor is cut to fit. 

She is Yrsa made manifest, two hands taller and born to the Ravens. 

The roar of the feast hall breaks back into Randvi's ears like breaching the surface of a summer lake when Sigurd puts a hand to her elbow. "Meet my wife," he says with a grin as wide as the moon, a grin that seems to say something along the lines of _I told you so._

"Sigurd's wife, eh?" The drengr, Eivor, hums with her own knowing grin. It pulls at the scar on her face and, Randvi notices as she lets her stare linger on Eivor's lips, a shallow nick at the top bow-curve of her mouth. Eivor bows into a graceful half-bend while her mead remains balanced and still as dawn water in her hand. "A pleasure to know my brother has not bound himself to a nykr by accident—I see his eyesight has improved since last winter. Welcome to Rygjafylke!"

Sigurd’s smile sharpens at the jape. "She is Randvi Ròarsdòttir, once of the Reindeers and now our fledgling Raven." He looks between Eivor and Randvi eagerly, and Randvi desperately hopes that the pang of emotion that stabbed cold and sharp as Sigurd said _once of the Reindeers_ does not show on her face. It is her wedding, gods damn this, as hurried and unwelcome as it is—she will not parse the small deaths of things today. 

"Randvi," Eivor says as though tasting her name, and Randvi might feel shame at how quickly the sound of it makes her feel in better spirits if she weren't already overrun with the gamut of her own stresses. "You'll make a fine one of us, although I would hope you do not shed your antlers just yet. I'm sure you have much from the north that you can teach us as you make your life here?"

Eivor does not look away from her, and indeed keeps her gaze pinned intently on Randvi as she waits for an honest answer. Randvi swallows, searching for her voice in earnest for the first time since the ceremony—time moving in it's strange bends, that already feels like a lifetime away. "Aye, namely I hope I can lend you some comfort with maps. I sense diplomacy is not the first instinct here."

To Randvi's inward delight, Eivor laughs with a bright, carefree cackle. "I look forward to your lessons then, and perhaps my crew might have some as well!"

"Eivor was raiding to the south," Sigurd explains. He has a cup of mead now that someone has pushed into his hand, and he quaffs half of it in one toss. "If, I assume, they had stayed on course, they should have arrived yesterday."

Eivor raises her horn in confirmation, and she and Sigurd finish off their respective drinks. "But now I am here by time’s teeth, and in one piece, Oðin be praised." She nods at Randvi's empty hands. "What, brother, does your wife go without mead on her own wedding day?!"

Sigurd breaks with laughter, and despite the handsome rakishness of the way her husband leans into happiness, Randvi finds that the only direction to which she can rein her heart is toward the glittering, cunning burn of Eivor's gaze. 

Something in the drengr's iceberg eyes flashes. _So you feel it as well?_ Randvi craves to whisper. 

"Mead!” Sigurd cries, one hand flung out. Randvi starts at the quick movement. Eivor seems to hold in a smirk. “Someone pour mead for my wife!”

With a horn of Randvi’s own drink in hand, the feast hall cheers. They make another loud ruckus, this time with Eivor’s granite-rough voice chanting along— _Kneyfa, kneyfa, drink, drink!_ Sigurd hooks his arm through Randvi’s, nearly upending her horn, but they put their cups to their lips and gulp down. Randvi shuts her eyes as she drains it, a sticky trickle of it escaping her lips, and the hall roars with praise.

“A good portent,” Eivor cries when the two come away gasping for air and half-laughing, “you already know how to drink like a Raven!”

She fills Randvi’s horn to the brim again as Sigurd is dragged away to the first of many wrestling bouts—Randvi would bet silver that his exchange with Njal over the sword-sticking is long forgotten in the swell of celebration. She should probably be bothered by the way she relaxes as he stalks to the other end of the hall and leaves her with his most fearsome warrior.

But bothered is far from what she feels.

“My brother is halfway to a fool and thinks only with his pride,” Eivor says without preamble as she takes a seat beside one of the emptied roasting spits. She downs a draught of ale and motions for Randvi to take the space beside her, as though conversing easily with a shipmate. “But he is a kind man. He will make sure you are comfortable here.”

“Is he much younger than you?” Randvi asks, touching absently at the complex weaving of plaits at the back of her head to ensure they haven’t sagged through the ceremony and the to-do that got them into the feast hall. Eivor laughs again; Randvi’s stomach twists pleasantly.

“He is older by four winters,” she clarifies, fixing a genial smile on Randvi—it is fairly enchanting to imagine how the sharp lines of her beauty could so easily sharpen to fearsome combativeness in the mud-churn of a battlefield. “But I suppose we are near enough in spirit that his father took me in easily.”

Randvi draws her brows together. She knows the code of an orphan, has seen many Reindeer children become such overnight after hard battles with other clans. “Was it in combat, or by blight?”

Eivor waves a dismissive hand, but not before Randvi catches a flutter of some phantom pain slash through her expression in a blink. “Both of them by the hand of a coward I have vowed to grind to ash, but that is no matter for now; it’s poor luck to talk of death at a wedding.”

They make easy conversation, as though rather than women born on different sides of a bloodied border they were instead old friends, united after a long spell apart. Randvi finishes two horns of mead, three, and a fourth, and she’s laughing hard at some twist of wit from Eivor’s surprisingly silver tongue as Eivor gives her an appraising, approving look.

“Tell me something, Randvi Róarsdóttir, how is it you plan to woo not only your new husband, but the whole of our clan?” she asks smoothly. It should not pull Randvi’s heart so ardently to hear both her names from Eivor’s mouth—and yet. She snorts, if not to cover the pink creeping up at her cheeks beneath the mead-blush.

“With my northern charm, of course,” she deadpans. Eivor laughs, her head tossing back slightly. The strong cords of her throat bared, her throat bobbing with the cadence of mirth; Randvi forbids herself from staring for too long.

“Of course!” Eivor accents. She leans forward, one elbow on her knee as though settling in to weave a story. “We are a people who appreciate charm above all, you know.”

Randvi raises an eyebrow. “More than a well-made axe?”

Eivor chuckles to herself and winks at Randvi as she raises her horn to her lips. “Perhaps not _all.”_

Before Randvi can tumble even further down the steep hill of her own reckless folly for dangerous-looking women, a victorious racket erupts from the wrestling circle. She and Eivor look over to see one of the groomsmen hoisting Sigurd’s arm into the air— _Again!_ One of the other Ravens shouts, and a raucous agreement follows. Randvi lets out a breath she hadn’t meant to be holding; each moment Sigurd spends occupied with celebrating, Randvi can spend getting to know this glimmering axeblade of a drengr.

“Has he tried to be poetic yet?” Eivor hums, her eyes narrowed in the men’s direction with a sisterly glint of judgement behind them. A small sniff of laughter leaps from Randvi’s chest.

“Yes, the poor thing—he nearly dropped my ring at the ceremony for his shaking hands, and he said it was because I looked so lovely.”

“Ha!” Eivor scuffs a carefree fist against the flat of her thigh. “Just wait until he’s on his sixth horn of mead after lathering himself struggling so in the dirt, he’ll be comparing you to trees.”

_“Trees?”_ Randvi squints at Eivor.

“It’s a favorite angle of his, gods know why.” Eivor smiles sideways and looks up into the middle-distance, peering intently at old memories. “‘Enchanting as unfallen leaves in winter,’ he once called a maiden from Firdafylke.”

Eivor’s lightness is infectious, and Randvi can’t help but play along in the comfortable cradle of the mead doing its work in her blood. “I would think I’m something close to a yew, if I had to choose,” she muses. Eivor looks intrigued and leans a touch closer—Randvi smells juniper oil in her hair and warrior’s leather-musk on her from so near. Her skin tingles.

“Do you also call a crackling song to the gods when you burn, I wonder?” Eivor murmurs. Randvi swallows and tells herself the glimmering in the depth of Eivor’s wide, dark pupils is nothing but friendly challenge.

Warmed with drink, Randvi leans close as well and tips her head slightly to one side. “If you attempt to put flame to me, drengr, step carefully; it is said my mother’s mother before her walked through a lake of fire, and now our red hair makes us battleproof.”

Eivor makes a soft sound of intrigue low in her throat. Randvi feels it in her very bones and nearly shivers despite the heady warmth of the feast hall. “Will you still go a viking with us then, my queen?”

The casual treason, a careless flirting with danger from someone so powerful, makes Randvi’s belly knot and turn with a sweet dragging sensation low in her gut. “Perhaps,” she says, a bit breathlessly, “if my husband is so bold as to allow me.”

Before she can snatch the word out of the air and back into her mouth, Randvi feels the air shift ever so slightly with the word _husband_ —as though Eivor has sensed it as well, she adjusts her seat ever so slightly and glances at the ground. It is not enough to offend, but enough that Randvi wants to tug at time’s thread and let her rewrite her words.

Eivor looks back to the wrestlers and chews idly at the corner of her lower lip. “Sigurd is not a bold man.” She sips again from her mead, and Randvi has the keen feeling she is being told a precious secret. “He is strong, and with honest intention, but he has much to learn.”

“And what of you,” Randvi says gently, “who would tempt her _queen_ with a torch at her feet?”

As intended, Eivor looks back at her with those piercing norðrljós eyes. Randvi decides in the moment that it is like mooring at a harbor she has never seen in person but has visited many times in her dreams, to be fixed so by Eivor’s gaze. “They call me Wolf-Kissed,” Eivor murmurs. She pulls her hair aside and bears a fearsome scar, mottled at the base of her neck with three silvery gashes playing in the gaps between her dark braids beneath a raven tattoo curling about one ear. “What you were given by a lake of fire, I was given by Fenryr’s spawn. So long as I wear these scars into battle, I do not fall.”

She bunts her drinking horn against Randvi’s when Randvi does not respond, does not trust her tongue to say anything safe with the heart-melting proof of indomitability unfolding before her in one tall, handsome body. _It is your wedding,_ some desperate and distant piece of her mind shouts to empty thoughts, _it is your fucking wedding!_

“It seems Rygjafylke is filling itself with harrowing women, isn’t it?” Eivor says with a sideways grin.

As Sigurd throws another challenger to the tamped dirt if another swell of shouts from the circle is to be believed, Randvi wrestles madly with her own compulsion. Were she such a _harrowing_ woman, she might be brave enough to throw herself across the bench at Eivor and seal their lips together as every inch of her body is bidding her to in that drunken, addled moment.

“Aye,” is all she manages, and drinks deeply.

—

The feast wears on until everyone’s pewter is scraped clean of food and the mead barrels sink to dregs. After the toasts, after the oaths, Randvi is pulled into dances with Sigurd and countless other Ravens—but never Eivor, as Randvi made to pull her into a round once just to be near her again and was met by a polite refusal and something about leaden left feet. When everyone tires back to sitting down they hear several sagas spun by the fine skalds, and everyone sinks into the pleasant scrim of well-earned drunkenness.

Randvi finds herself at such a comfortable pitch of merriment by the small hours of the night that she nearly forgets she has one other duty.

“Away!” One of the groomsmen shouts over the applause at the end of Alvis’ unique interpretation of Freyja breaking her golden boar. “Away to the bridal couch!”

An appropriately filthy jeer of a cheer chains through the hall, and Randvi’s heart drops into her stomach. She is grateful for the mead, as without it she might have visibly paled at the reminder of her new role as a broodmare. A warm hand closes over hers and she drags her stare to meet its owner; Sigurd is giving her a spurring, sloppy grin.

“My wife,” he slurs, “my Randvi, shall we end our night with a _burst_ of victory?”

The Ravens around them egg them on, pulling them up into a stand and shepherding them toward the feast hall doors. Randvi’s pulse hammers high and hot, her vision swimming. “Yes,” she manages to mumble. Her throat tastes of bile.

Draped with furs and ushered outside, the party accompanies them along another torchlit patch through the screaming wind, their cheering festivity nearly ripped away by the weather’s quick hands. They stop outside a house garlanded with hollies and fir, and Randvi fears for a moment that they are all going to cram inside and watch.

“Njal, Bo, Sten, Sune,” Sigurd calls, waving his groomsmen over and stumbling slightly into Randvi’s side, “bear witness!”

Randvi’s pulse slams in her ears, fogging her hearing, and she feels very small very suddenly to see the groomsmen jostling over and leering at her. She searches wildly for someone familiar in the wedding crowd who might make her feel safer, her mother or one of the Raven women, or—

“Eivor!” Sigurd adds. Randvi’s knees nearly go out with relief. “Have we the vǫlva with us?”

Eivor shoulders gently to the fore of the crowd at the stoop of the house with a wiry old woman beside her. Draped in the heavy robes of a seeress, Randvi recognizes her purpose as she would have back home: to bless the consummation of the marriage and petition fertility from Freyja herself.

“Aye,” Eivor says with a solemn nod of her head. Her eyes flick to and away from Randvi in a flash, as though looking at her stings somehow. “And shall I stay, brother?”

Randvi’s breath freezes in her lungs as though it were air from the far north, stilled by the cold itself. She stares at Eivor and thinks to herself _Look at me, look at me, look at me_ —the drengr’s jaw is tight, her carriage tense. With a wild thought, Randvi longs to drag her inside instead of Sigurd.

“Why not!” Sigurd crows. He is deeply drunk, and swaying with it as he gestures broadly. Randvi is unsure whether or not to acknowledge the trilling thrill that lights behind her breastbone.

Njal pushes open the cottage door and lets the vǫlva enter first. Randvi feels Eivor approach at her shoulder, protective as though tailing her into battle, and catches her ever so softly about the wrist as Sigurd goes in ahead of them and the Ravens crowded outside shout lewd suggestions, blessings, and shouts of encouragement.

“If he hurts you,” she hisses, her breath warm on Randvi’s ear, “I am too far in drink to keep from striking him.”

Randvi twists to meet her gaze for an instant, their stares clashing. She wets her lips with a nervous dart of her tongue and finds strength in the hungry way Eivor tracks it. “Stand near and let me look at you, and it will be smoother for me.”

She does not linger to see the slight widening of Eivor’s eyes at that, the flare of her nostrils and the clenching of her jaw. Randvi turns and follows her husband to their bridal couch to the wingbeat cadence of her racing heart.

The cottage goes quiet when all the witnesses are inside and situated with the door shut behind them, and the vǫlva begins her low, thrumming chant. 

“Randvi,” Sigurd murmurs, trying at tender but landing on raspy effort as he presses a kiss at the corner of Randvi’s mouth. He draws her close, and she can feel the half-hardness of him in his breeches against her thigh. “Randvi, my wife.”

“Husband,” Randvi replies after an awkward pause, bereft without the lead of someone else’s amour to draw her in. She takes a step back and lowers herself to the pillowy bed, holding Sigurd by the hand. Through the golden glow of overindulgence and the dark of the hut, it is almost comfortable as her pulse matches pace with the seer-song.

Sigurd puts one sweating palm to her knee and pushes at her skirts. Two of the groomsmen make sounds of encouragement, and Randvi keeps herself from looking over at Eivor’s burning presence before she truly needs to. _Peace,_ she tells herself, shutting her eyes as Sigurd bares her knees and thighs before pulling down her woolen under-breeches.

“You are lovely,” Sigurd groans, working at the stays of his trousers with stumbling fingers, “so lovely—am I not deserving of such a perfect bride?”

He turns to look over his shoulder at his groomsmen, who whoop and jeer in agreement. Randvi can feel their eyes on her in the dark, her sex bared and making her tremble with the craving to hide herself. _Peace,_ she thinks again. Eivor is stone-silent.

Sigurd kisses her again, and again misses her lips and lands at the edge of her mouth. “Can I touch you?” he whispers. Randvi can only nod.

His two fingers are chilly against the warmth of her body, but Randvi does not let herself flinch. Sigurd groans, his cheek balanced against her forehead. “This,” he moans, “is better than I had imagined.”

Randvi does not have the heart to tell him she’s hardly yet gotten wet for him. “Thank you,” she whispers uselessly.

“I want to be inside you,” Sigurd says, nearly begs as it sounds halfway to a question. Randvi reaches down in the muzzy half-dark to find him, and she nearly sags with relief to find it a perfectly manageable size in her hand. Sigurd twitches as she wraps her fingers about his base, shifting her hips.

“Go slowly,” she bids him, amending quickly, “it’s—it’s better if it lasts longer.”

Sigurd huffs a short sound of assent and lets out a wounded, ecstatic sound as Randvi positions him at her entrance. “Slowly, please,” she repeats again, and trusts Sigurd to obey her.

Finally, laying back onto her wedding bed, Randvi lets her knees fall open and finds Eivor’s gaze like a lodestone.

Even without the peppering of candles throughout the cozy interior, Randvi could have found it in blind dark. Hunched against the wall, her arms crossed and her body tensed as though ready to spring at the slightest hint of a pained sound from Randvi, Eivor looks on with a desperate flare in her stare. Randvi knows that desperation well—it’s precisely how she used to look down at Yrsa as she took her sweet time licking Randvi to sanity’s edge.

Randvi feels herself slicken around the prod of Sigurd’s length as she holds Eivor’s eyes and remembers the feeling of a playful tongue against her, the hot press of longing pulling at her slit and her heart at once. She imagines how it might feel to have Eivor’s face between her legs and lets her eyes flutter shut for a moment to see it in her mind. 

_“Oh,”_ she gasps, her back arching slightly at the illusion—Sigurd’s groomsmen give him an encouraging slew of cheering. Randvi opens her eyes again and takes solace in the humming tensity rolling from Eivor like fog.

_In a different time,_ Randiv thinks, perhaps thinks it loudly enough for Eivor to hear somehow, _in a different life, perhaps it really is you instead._

Sigurd’s body spasms suddenly with a surprised choke of a sound, and his arms buckle where he’s propped them beside Randvi. “I— _ah,_ I’m there—!” he cries.

The groomsmen cheer again, and Randvi feels the weak pulse of his completion inside her. Eivor’s jaw flutters as Randvi spends one last moment staring hard at her. _Perhaps it is you instead._

She is far from euphoria herself, but so be it. She is, after all, a wife now.

Sigurd kisses her messily on the forehead, panting with the effort of what probably feels to him the most glorious fuck of all nine worlds. “Well done,” he bids her with a toothy grin. Randvi can already see the struts of torpor taking him over, both the mead and the refraction rising to swallow him soon. He will sleep like a stone tonight.

“Well done,” she repeats right back. Her husband beams. Somewhere deep in Randvi’s heart, the embers of resentment begin glowing already.

—

Sleep comes quickly that night after so much mead and the high-strung stress of the bridal couch, but it is strange to find Sigurd beside her when Randvi wakes several times in the dark. Up from the tangle of deep sleep, it is jarring and somewhat disappointing to find a snoring jarl’s son taking the space beside her rather than the dark-haired valkyries of her dreams before she drifts off again.

It should not be so easy to let her heart succumb to a handsome drengr woman, Randvi thinks as she sits half-awake the next morning to let the Raven women braid her hair into the married fashion. It should be much more difficult to let herself bend like a fucking sapling to such unexpected allure.

_Do you also call a crackling song to the gods when you burn, I wonder?_

Randvi nearly shakes her head to chase away the gold-rimed memory of Eivor’s low murmur, and she’s lucky she stays herself from it; Gudrun pushes a long pin into the last plait of her hair and steps back with a proud smile as she declares Randvi ready to receive her morning-gift.

“Is he at the longhouse, as for the ceremony?” Randvi asks, standing while she allows herself a moment to admire the beautiful twisting of Gudrun’s handiwork on her long blaze of hair. Gudrun grins at her in the mirror’s reflection and drapes her in a rich, midnight-blue cloak.

“Yes, but you’ll have a Raven to guide you,” she assures Randvi. “We are not so bold as to expect you know your new home so immediately.”

_Home._ It is a strange thing to think about Rygjafylke after so soon, but it is the truth.

Randvi steps through Gudrun’s door, and her heart leaps into her throat. Eivor stands waiting with two towering geldings saddled beside her.

“I am not allowed in there, unmarried” she says with, what, is that sheepishness Randvi can sense under her toughened bark? “But I will show you to the longhouse.”

There is something sweet about the way she half-avoids Randvi’s eyes as she holds out a hand to help Randvi onto her horse. “Thank you,” Randvi says simply.

Eivor’s eyes dart to and away from her in quick, jagged angles before she swings easily onto her own saddle. “Our colors,” she grunts, nodding her chin at Randvi’s cloak, “they look well on you.”

Before Randvi can drum up a reply, Eivor wheels her horse around and clicks her cheek to spur it into a trot. Randvi follows, her heart between her teeth, through the snow-packed roads of Fornburg.

They take a winding route through the village, and Randvi is warmed to see Ravens coming to their doors to hail her even despite the shield-pound of overindulgence likely chorusing in most of their skulls. _Randvi,_ they call, _fjǫr til Randvi ok Sigurd!_

“They like you,” Eivor calls over her shoulder as a child throws a sprig of holly to Randvi in passing. She glances back at Randvi and gives a small but earnest smile. “You are lucky.”

“Or just painfully pleasant,” Randvi quips back. Eivor’s eyes flash. Randvi’s chest blooms with warmth.

“It feels calmer here now, and not just because of our collective hangover,” Eivor replies. Randvi sniffs a laugh.

“I agree. I wouldn’t have expected the union to have such a quick effect, but I won’t question it.”

Eivor takes her own turn to chuckle, and Randvi does not press at why. Eivor unhorses several paces from the longhouse and helps Randvi down to the ground—her touch is strong and steady around Randvi’s fingers.

“You called it _the_ union,” Eivor murmurs, leaning close for a moment, “not _your_ union.”

When Eivor does not lean away immediately, Randvi slides her eyes up to Eivor’s. Their gazes clash for a breathtaking moment. _She’s going to kiss me,_ a wild corner of Randvi’s thoughts cries into the gaps of her bones. Randvi swallows and does not miss the way Eivor’s stare flickers along her throat to track its flex and release. She is still holding Randvi’s hand.

“I am new to being someone’s wife. It will take some time to get used to,” she says softly. “Undoubtedly I will make mistakes as I learn.”

“Undoubtedly,” Eivor agrees in a pale whisper, and the bare hunger in her stare is not simply Randvi’s imagination.

_Would that you might be a willing error in this fabric of mine,_ Randvi longs to shout. As though she can hear Randvi’s frantic hopes, Eivor drops into a low and graceful bow. “It is thanks to you, Randvi, and your bravery in joining our people that our clan has that time in the first place.”

From her place bowed over Randvi’s hand, the hesitation is not quite clear—but Randvi senses that had she seen the drengr’s face in that moment she would see rare and unfettered unsurety in those white-blue eyes before Eivor brings Randvi’s fingers to her lips and kisses her softly, slowly—longingly.

Randvi’s heart plummets into her stomach. By the nornir’s gnarled knuckles, it seems she has been married to the wrong Raven.

“Now,” Eivor says briskly as she stands, “shall I see you to your morning-gift?”

Randvi steadies her pulse with a low breath. _We have time,_ she reminds herself, girds herself; _we have so much time._

“Lead on, Wolf-Kissed.”

At that, Eivor smiles a trickster’s smile. With her broad shoulders drawn back, her head held high and proud, she turns to lead Randvi into the longhouse—into her future, into the first steps of a confounding life amid Ravens.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact! The word “vulva” comes from “vǫlva,” which means “wisewoman” or “wand-bearer” in Old Norse. Hence, people with vulvas are hella wise!! That’s the rules!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, I hope to have another pre-Harald piece spun up soon to the tune of more pining-and-yearning-and-not-doing-a-damn-thing-about-it :)
> 
> As ever, feel free to find me on Discord at Chromat1cs#6726 and Twitter at [@arsen_i](https://twitter.com/arsen_i)


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